Medical engineering systems are characterized by increasing complexity and modularity. As a rule, a plurality of components are to be connected before a medical engineering system is ready to use at all. Numerous interfaces are usually to be connected to a connection means or connection device, which may require a great effort, imply a high risk for errors and possibly availability problems.
Besides connections that are necessary to embody different material flows, possibilities of establishing data connections are of increasing significance. Numerous data must be kept permanently available during medical treatments. At the same time, a large amount of other data, which must be logged and/or taken into account in therapeutic decisions, is generated during the treatment of patients. Loss of such data, which can definitely happen under the time pressure that usually prevails, requires increased effort for restoring the data or for further data acquisition. Numerous data interfaces are known, which are connected to separate cables or other connection means in order to allow medical engineering components to communicate with one another.
Furthermore, it is known that external data storage media with data sets can be kept ready in order to make it possible to perform the expedited adaptation of medical engineering components when needed. It is known, for example, that certain modes of operation or control modes can be released or blocked on medical engineering devices by means of external data storage media (DE 101 16 650 A1).
Furthermore, it is known that such units can be adapted to the needs of individual operators by external data storage media and the connection thereof with complex, computer-controlled medical engineering units (DE 196 25 410 A1).
Finally, it is known that sets of settings and parameters of medical engineering devices, for example, of an ECG (Electrocardiogram) monitor, which are generated during a treatment, can be stored in an external memory and that this memory can be read by the new device after the particular device is replaced with a new device. It thus becomes unnecessary to manually transfer sets of parameters or settings (DE 198 09 952 A1).
It is common to the above examples of the state of the art that an external memory, which is configured especially for storing and making available special data sets, must always be connected to a medical engineering device in order to completely establish the ability to function. This requires, on the one hand, special actions and requires increased attention because such data storage media, usually designed as a chip card, may be lost in a short time in work processes taking place under a high time pressure, which would lead to a considerable stagnation or a subsequent effort.